Hello Debito.org Newsletter Readers. We’ve taken some time off for Summer, but inspired by one the season’s most memorable events, here are the opening paragraphs of my latest Japan Times “Just Be Cause” column, which came out this morning:

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JBC 108: Let’s talk about Charlottesville.

As you probably heard, two weeks ago there was a protest in a small Virginia town against the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee, a Confederate general who defended slavery in the American South. Various hate groups, including white supremacists, neo-Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan, assembled there with shields, weapons, fascist flags and anti-Semitic slogans. They were met with counterprotest, and things got violent. A supremacist slammed his car into a crowd of counterprotesters, killing one and injuring 19.

Charlottesville has shaken hope for a post-racial America to the core. But before readers in Japan breathe a sigh of relief and think, “It couldn’t happen here, not in peaceful Japan,” remember this:

Japan has also had plenty of hate rallies — there was about one per day on average in 2013 and 2014, according to the Justice Ministry. Rightist xenophobes and government-designated hate groups have assembled and held demos nationwide. Bearing signs calling foreign residents “cockroaches,” calling for a Nanking-style massacre of Koreans in an Osaka Koreatown, even advocating the extermination of “all Koreans, good or bad,” Japan’s haters have also used violence (some lethal) against the country’s minorities.

As JBC has argued before (“Osaka’s move on hate speech should be just the first step,” Jan. 31, 2016), freedom of speech is not an absolute. And hate speech is special: It ultimately and necessarily leads to violence, due to the volatile mix of dehumanization with flared tempers.

That’s why Japan decided to do something about it. In 2016 the Diet passed a law against hate speech (albeit limiting it to specifically protect foreign residents). And it has had an effect: Japanese media reports fewer rallies and softer invective.

America, however, hasn’t gotten serious about this. It has no explicit law against hate speech, due to fears about government censorship of freedom of speech. Opponents argue that the only cure is freer speech — that somehow hate will be balanced out by reasonable and rational counter-hate. That persuasion will win out.

But in 2016, it didn’t. Hate speech is precisely how Donald J. Trump got elected president…
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GOOD NEWS 1) Japan’s National Pension scheme lowers minimum qualification time from 25 years to 10!

Good news. Until now, if you wanted to qualify for any retirement payout under the Japanese National Pension System (Nenkin), you had to contribute 300 months, or 25 years, of your salary in Japan. This was an enormously high hurdle for many NJ residents, who would pay in but not always elect to stay the bulk of their working life in Japan. That meant that aside from getting back a maximum of three years’ worth of contributions upon request, you’d effectively lose your retirement investment as an enormous exit tax.

It made it so that the longer you stayed in Japan, the more of a pension prisoner you became, since if you left the country to work elsewhere, you’d lose, because you hadn’t paid into pension schemes in other countries and wouldn’t qualify. But now the threshold for qualifying at all in Japan has fortunately been reduced. From 25 to 10 years, as of August 2017. Hurrah.

SSJJ: Why are there so few academic books or articles on Japan with the word ‘Racism’ in the title? It would be odd, to say the least, if Japan were the only inhabited place on earth where racism did not exist. Could it be that racial minorities in Japan are made up of groups that are too small, too transitory or too lacking in visibility to be worth the effort of close study? A more plausible explanation is offered by those who, like anthropologist John Russell, argue that powerful groups have disseminated the ‘national myth of Japan as a racism-free society that always manages to retain uncorrupted its essentialistic character, despite cultural borrowings’ (Russell 2010: 110). Given this highly successful effort to hush up discussions of racism in Japan, Debito Arudou’s new book on ‘Embedded Racism’ is very welcome. […]

In an anti-globalist era of Trump and ‘Brexit’ there will be many who argue that Japan is right to severely restrict immigration and preserve as much as possible that is unique about its national character. If those who do not ‘look Japanese’ have to suffer some discrimination, then that is just the price that has to be paid. There are also many who believe that the best antidote to racism is to have a nation state where as few people as possible look out of place. Arudou’s reply to this point of view, which acts simultaneously as a challenge to Japan’s leaders, is that if this national narrative is allowed to prevail, it will not only condemn Japan’s aging population to an ever-worsening demographic crisis, it will also have a ‘suffocating and self-strangulating’ effect on society (p. 303).

There are important academic contributions to the study of racism in Japan in this book, but it is as a must-read text on the crisis facing the shrinking Japanese population and its leaders that it really leaves its mark. Embedded Racism is highly recommended reading to anyone—whether they self-identify as Japanese or foreign or both—who is interested in Japan’s future.

FAUX NEWS
3) Yomiuri: 4th generation Nikkei to get new visa status. Come back, all is forgiven! Just don’t read the fine print.

Ten years after bribing and booting out its Nikkei “Returnee” workers from South America (who had been given sweetheart visas of de facto Permanent Residency, higher-paying jobs than the “Trainee” slaves from places like China (but still lower than real Japanese, natch)), and four years after lifting a ban on their return, the government has officially decided to introduce a new residency status to exploit the next (4th) generation of Nikkei. As long as they a) speak Japanese, b) are young enough to devote their best working years here, c) come alone, and d) only stay three years. Those are some tweaks that makes things less advantageous for the foreigner, so I guess the previous racist policy favoring Wajin foreigners has been improved (as far as the government is concerned) to keep them disposable, and less likely to need a bribe to go home when the next economic downturn happens. That’s how the Japanese government learns from its mistakes — by making the visa status more exclusionary and exploitative.

In the wake of my previous blog entry about a new exploitative visa system for the next generation of Nikkei workers, here’s a hand-wringing article from the Asahi about how people don’t (but really should) accept NJ as part of Japanese society. It seems like these articles are cyclical — I remember them from a good ten years ago (for example here and here and here and here). Fortunately, the Asahi draws the same conclusions I would. Alas, next serious economic downturn, all this will be out of the window and foreigners will be unaccepted again.

Asahi: Foreign workers in Japan are increasingly being seen as a valuable resource amid Japan’s declining birthrate and growing elderly population. However, recent headlines in the media express concern about the influx of immigrants. “Should we accept immigrants?” one publication asked. Another worried that, “What will happen if foreigners become our bosses?” The reality is that the number of foreign workers now totals more than 1 million. Japanese are increasingly coming in contact with foreigners in their daily lives, so they are no longer an “invisible presence.” Acceptance is unavoidable

Mainichi: It has been a year since Japan’s anti-hate speech law took effect. And over that year, the number of demonstrations targeting specific races or ethnicities has apparently declined… It is perfectly natural to make sure that countermeasures against hate speech demonstrations do not lead to curbs on freedom of expression, but hate speech clearly violates human rights. We would like to see local governments across the country consider hate speech regulations in line with local conditions… Meanwhile, it should be remembered that even primary school children use computers and smartphones. Educating school children about online hate ought to be a national project.

COMMENT: We’ve talked before about unsophisticated columns in Japanese media regarding human rights. This one joins them. It wags a few fingers and applauds some local moves to eliminate hate speech, but it still has trouble going beyond vague urgings to actually advocate for the root solution: passing a law with criminal penalties against racial discrimination. Until this law in specific is part of the media’s steady drumbeat of finger-wagging, advocating a mere patchwork of local-level patches is again, a half-measure.

Chavez: “Any Japanophile will have at least one of the 30 or so books authored by Boye Lafayette De Mente during his long and prolific writing career in Japan. His works are read by travelers, businesspeople and scholars alike, with offerings ranging from “The Pocket Tokyo Subway Guide” to the “Tuttle Japanese Business Dictionary,” and my personal favorite, “Kata: The Key to Understanding and Dealing with the Japanese.” Several of his books have become classics…”

COMMENT: One the last of the truly old-school postwar “Japan analysts”, who helped set the tone of Japanology as a pseudoscience fueled by stereotype. Check out his list of titles on Wikipedia and you’ll see the undermining of Tuttle as a reliable-source publisher. “Women of the Orient: Intimate Profiles of the World’s Most Feminine Women”, dated 1992, where he boasts of his sexual escapades, and draws broad conclusions about how Asian women please White men like him, anyone? Or if you want something approaching a different kind of lingus, try “The Japanese Have a Word for It: The Complete Guide to Japanese Thought and Culture.” (“Complete”?). Plenty more that anybody actually trained in modern Humanities or Social Sciences would find highly problematic. Eulogies are one thing. But let’s not whitewash this person’s publishing record. “Classic” does mean “influential”, but it should not in this case necessarily imply “good”.

7) Daily Show on overseas media interpreters’ self-censorship of Trump’s language: Japanese interpreter plays dumb, claims no way to express “grab ’em by the pu**y”

Trevor Noah and company on the Daily Show make an interesting case about how Trump’s language, both in terms of content and syntax, is challenging for translators in other languages to render. They make the point that the impact and nuance is often softened by translator self-censorship (or filling in the gaps with personal interpretations) But at minute 4:00 of the segment, the Japanese interpreter claims that there is no accurate way to translate Trump’s infamous “grab ’em by the pu**y” remark. She even claims that there is no word “in the exact sense” for “pu**y” in Japanese.

Rubbish. I can think of quite a few words that would do the trick, in content and especially in nuance. The two easiest, of course, are om*nko or om*nta, as in “om*nta o tsukandari shite”, and in Trump’s case I would even remove their honorific prefixes. Of course, that would require bleeping out the syllable after “man”, but it’s been done on Japanese TV before. I’ve seen it. But I dislike it when people, especially in this case a professional interpreter, play dumb and deny. Repeating that old lie that we heard as beginning Japanese students that “there are no bad words in Japanese”. Like it or not, “om*nta” what 45 said. Portray it accurately. Or, as the segment argued well, the awfulness of 45’s speech is bleached out simply because the interpreter is being too diplomatic, cultured, or prudish.

Long-time readers of Debito.org know what a deep appreciation I have for ’80s band Duran Duran — which is still putting out good albums chock full of good music (see below), and touring to full arenas. I was at the Blaisdell Arena in Honolulu tonight to catch them (for the second time, the first back in Canandaigua NY on June 26, 1987). Good seats, great setlist. This was their first time playing in Honolulu (they cancelled a previous date in 1994 due to lead singer Simon Le Bon losing his voice), and as the last stop on their current tour (they spent a few days recuperating on-island), they put on an excellent show to a rapt crowd.

And, I’m proud to say, thanks to mutual friend GB, I got a backstage pass. And met and briefly chatted with Simon Le Bon. Yes, a photo of us is enclosed. I’m going to treasure this memory for a lifetime, as I have been following DD assiduously since 1982. Thanks GB. And thanks Simon.

As for people who still think Duran Duran peaked in the mid-1980s, I challenge you to listen to my iPod’s “Damn Good Duran Duran” playlist. (And in terms of musicality, I also challenge you to listen to John Taylor’s bass line on the song “Rio” as an isolated track, and tell me it doesn’t rank up there with Geddy Lee or Tina Weymouth.) Here are 40 remarkable DD songs in the order I play them. You can find them on YouTube if not on iTunes:

That’s all for this month. Enjoy the cooling temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere and the warming in the Southern.

Debito Arudou Ph.D.DEBITO.ORG NEWSLETTER AUGUST 23, 2017 ENDS

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18 comments on “DEBITO.ORG NEWSLETTER AUGUST 23, 2017”

Here is a well-sourced rational rebuttal to “Monocle (co-opted by Nikkei in 2014, the Nikkei president commented, “through this wide-reaching partnership, we will be able to further boost our global reach”) Magazine’s 2017 ‘Tokyo is the most liveable city in the world’ – for the 3rd year in a row 2015, 2016, 2017” suspiciously biased claim.

Steve Jackson writes:

It’s hard to make much sense of this ranking, since the criteria for what makes a city livable vary by individual. For example, Tokyo may not be such a such great choice if you’re a career-minded ambitious and independent woman, since Japan comes in a lowly 111 out of 144 countries in the WEF’s Global Gender Equality ranking. Japanese society is famously sexist and misogynistic, but clearly the Monocle ranking has not taken this into account.

Similarly, Tokyo is one of the least ethnically and racially diverse cities in the world. So, it is not the best place to live for anyone who likes diversity. Foreigners living here in Tokyo know that Tokyoites can be extremely provincial, insular, racist and xenophobic. There are very few non-Japanese who actually live in the Japanese capital, mostly because Japan is the only large developed country in the world which refuses to accept immigrants or refugees.

Tokyo is not a global, international or inclusive city by any stretch of the imagination. In Tokyo, upwards of ninety percent of all real estate listings openly state that the property is not available for rent to foreigners. This has been reported widely in Japanese media over the years, including the difficulty a Belgian university student had in trying to find housing (“Student seeking Kyoto flat told: No foreigners allowed”, The Japan Times, April 23, 2013). The worse part is that racial discrimination against foreigners in Japan is completely legal, accepted and state-sanctioned, since Japan is the only developed country in the world that has no laws against racial discrimination. A recent survey of foreign residents of Japan by The Japan Times showed that 82.5 percent of them had been refused housing because they are non-Japanese (“‘No foreign tenants’ — and not much you can do about it”, dated July 2, 2017).

Profiling and racial discrimination against anyone who does not look “Japanese” is something which the foreign population of Tokyo lives with on a daily basis. For example, there was an article published in The Japan Times recently under the headline, “Meet the man who gets frisked by the Tokyo police five times a year” (Jan 22, 2017). The article describes the ordeal of Jesse Freeman, an American resident of Tokyo, who is routinely targeted for stop-and-frisk by Tokyo Police. It starts out as, “Am I the only one who gets frisked five times a year?” was a question posed on Facebook by a black man living in Tokyo late last year, as he related the systematic and apparently racially motivated harassment he’s received at the hands of Tokyo’s finest over the course of his 10 years here.”, and goes on to say, “All told, since 2008, Freeman says he’s been stopped over 30 times by police in Tokyo.”

Tokyo also has a long history of barring foreigners from entering restaurants, bars, onsen and even clothing stores, by either posting “Japanese Only” and “No Foreigners Allowed” signs or by using other means. There are clothing stores even in places like Harajuku that to this day display hateful, obscene and discriminatory signs against foreigners, as was just covered earlier this month by The Japan Times in the article, “Tackling signs in Japan that you’re not welcome” (June 4, 2017).

Bigotry and discrimination against foreign workers is rampant in Tokyo and throughout Japan, since they are almost always marginalized, abused, bullied and treated as second-class employees by Japanese companies. The issues they face were discussed in an article titled, “Foreign workers: neither clowns nor terrorists” (The Japan Times, August 12, 2106).

Another huge problem with Tokyo is that, despite it being one of the world’s largest cities, almost nobody here speaks English. This includes doctors, hospitals, police and emergency services, so good luck to any foreigner who needs these services while in Tokyo. Japan also has one of the worst press in the world, as demonstrated by the fact that Japan ranks a very dismal number 72 in the 2017 World Press Freedom Index. Most of the newspapers and TV stations in Tokyo are merely PR arms of the government and big business with very little independence or objectivity.

So, I wish the Monocle ranking would award negative points to cities like Tokyo that do not protect the basic civil and human rights of all its residents, have a disregard for equality and which blatantly discriminate against people solely because they are non-Japanese. I also think Monocle really needs to have a category that properly measures how global, progressive, open-minded, inclusive and international a city is if it wants this ranking to have any credibility. These are surely criteria that Tokyo would not score well on.

Lastly, there are the negative things about life in Tokyo that affect the Japanese and non-Japanese residents of Tokyo equally, which frankly makes me question the objectivity and methodology of this ranking. Most people in Tokyo have quite a low standard of living by Western standards. They live in extremely small and cramped accommodations without any gardens or open spaces. It is extremely rare to find public parks or even places to go jogging outside. People have no leisure time since they work crazy hours and often have extremely long commutes to work on overcrowded trains. Many Japanese people I know in Tokyo don’t get home until 10 pm or later and are so exhausted that they spend most of their weekends sleeping. People in Tokyo have the worse work-life balance of all major cities in the world. Yet, the economy has been stagnant for thirty years and salaries have been declining.

Working in an office environment in Tokyo, even at some of Japan’s largest corporations, is like going back in time (when was the last time anyone heard of a new or exciting company emerging from Tokyo?). The fax machine is still king in offices all across Tokyo and most of the work is paper-based, as was described in an article in The Japan Times just last week (“As Japan Inc. Inefficiency Reigns, Some See Going Paperless as a Clear Fix”, June 21, 2017). The business practices, processes and mentality in corporate Japan are a throwback to the 1950s. It is no wonder that Japanese workers have the lowest productivity among all developed countries. A lot of this has to do with the very dysfunctional workplace here, as was highlighted in a global survey by the consulting firm E&Y which shows that Japan comes in dead last in all three categories out of the eight countries surveyed about whether workers trust their company, their bosses and their colleagues (in Japan, only 21 percent of employees trust their employer, only 22 percent of the employees trust their bosses and only 22 percent of employees trust their teams/colleagues).

Furthermore, Tokyo has one of the lowest rates of entrepreneurship, foreign direct investment and venture capital deals of any major city in the world (this is according to Bloomberg articles, “Is Japan Too Scared to Succeed”, by Michael Schuman, and “Japan Has the World’s Gloomiest Millennials”, dated, Nov. 25, 2016).

I’m not trying to beat up on Tokyo here, but I do feel that it’s important to understand the very subjective and biased nature of such rankings. I think someone can basically put any city in the world on top of such a ranking based on whatever criteria they choose to include or exclude from their methodology. Even the always on-time trains in Tokyo cited by Monocle have a very dark side, in that almost every woman I know here in Tokyo has been groped and molested on crowded Tokyo trains, many of them several times. The Japan Times shed light on this problem in an article, “Commuters fight back against groping”, dated July 30, 2016, which starts out as follows:

“Takako Tonooka’s life at high school did not start out the way she had anticipated. On the very first day she attended class, she was groped on the train — and that was only the beginning of her nightmare. For a year and a half, she was the victim of persistent groping attacks during her commute to and from school. On almost every train journey, Tonooka, who agreed to the interview on the condition of anonymity in order to protect her privacy, encountered a groper on the train, usually on her way home from school because she would ride the all-women carriages that operate during the morning rush hour. The gropers were different on each occasion and would include passengers who looked like they were still in their teens to salarymen and even elderly men.”

It’s interesting that Tokyo has consistently topped this list ever since the Japanese company Nikkei Inc. bought Monocle. The founder of Monocle Tyler Brule also works for the Financial Times, which too is wholly owned by Japanese publisher Nikkei Inc.

Yeah, that’s an awesome comment that sums up the whole thing. Love it.

And let’s not forget all the reaching out to o universities, schools and companies that the J-Gov is doing right now because it needs bi-lingual volunteers to help out at the Olympics.

Of course, they can’t reach out to resident NJ because;
1. Japan has a ‘No immigration’ policy, so officially, we don’t exist- we’re just tourists who are here for, like, a ‘really, really long time’, but we’re not ‘proper’ residents. And,
2. Japanese volunteers are needed to propagate the myth that Japan is ‘racially homogeneous’ to the visiting foreigners.

We bilingual long-term “gaijin-race” residents will explain Japan’s Apartheid Law reality to the visiting tourists:

“By the way, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, you are taking a big risk visiting here, since Japan’s Constitution only protects Japanese-race citizens from government worker actions, it doesn’t protect non-Japanese-races.

Meaning, Japan’s constitution thus allows police officers in Japan to use racial appearance as ‘grounds’ to forcefully stop and detain non-Japanese people, without reasonable suspicion, without probable cause, and then gang-interrogating, searching without a warrant, and even jailing for 23 days without any crime charge, since police officers in Japan are taught during training that non-Japanese in Japan have no legal rights. http://www.debito.org/?p=8997

Also, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, since Japan remains in violation of the U.N. CERD Treaty (the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, which Japan signed in 1996 but still decades later belligerently refuses to enact) Japan thus still has no Civil Rights Law.

Which means: in Japan all business owners and staff are legally allowed to commit racial discrimination against non-Japanese-citizens (and even against citizens-of-Japan who don’t happen to have ‘Japanese-race’ appearance) for example: refusing entry to business establishments based merely on your racial appearance.

Keep this in mind during your stay here in Japan: if you are not ‘racially Japanese’, you have absolutely no human rights here in Japan.

OK, try to have a nice stay, and make sure to tell your family and friends all about Japan when you return home.” 🙂

Yes, indeed. The Olympics is a prime opportunity to embarrass Japan on so many issues, using the threat of tarnishing its international image. This really should be the focus of a more concerted awareness campaign.

@ Jim, I think Japan will just be embarrassed in 2020, and I hope this will lead to some belated change, although probably also accompanied with a Japan as Victim narrative but that means it is Shouganai, America is imposing this on us, and therefore absolves the Japan Power Elite of blame when they make unpopular changes).

PS – Notice these sentences stick to the main points,
without getting side-tracked by any misdirection attempts.

Japan’s Government previously claimed to the United Nations:
“Japan DOES NOT HAVE many potential victims of businesses committing Racial Discrimination,
so Japan simply DOES NOT NEED to outlaw the act of businesses committing Racial Discrimination.”

(Which is as absurd as if Japan were to also take this stance:
“Japan DOES NOT HAVE many potential victims of individuals committing Punching,
so Japan simply DOES NOT NEED to outlaw the act of individuals committing Punching.”)

Seriously, Japan’s Government actually officially replied to the United Nations, about penalizing acts of Racial Discrimination:

No, I doubt these signs will be allowed, just like the “Japanese Only” sign was not allowed at the Urawa Reds stadium.
So then I realized the REAL reason why they took down that Japanese only sign; it was because it was “hazukashii” and controversial.

Plus it was showing the world what a lot of ordinary yet xenophobic Japanese might really think.

Thus, ANTI racist signs will also be deemed too controversial and political for a sporting event. Perhaps even more so, as in Japan it seems “Freedom of Expression” has been twisted into “Freedom to be Xenophobic, its just a choice”. As in, “I am sorry, but he doesnt want to deal with gaijin, it is his personal choice”.

I bet that’s what will happen- no political signs at the Olympics. Or what the authorities want to happen.

Thank you Baudrillard, for the good friendly push to create a solution.

OK, outside the arena, 10 people will concurrently pull out their phones and begin filming 20 people concurrently reveal (up-until-then-totally-hidden) 10 banners.

Just 10 seconds, filmed by 10 phones, of 10 banners, with the arena somewhere in the background, adds up to almost 2 minutes total compiled footage which we will send immediately (attached with a powerful press-release) to ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, FOX, Youtube, Reddit, Imgur, Worldstar, everywhere.

We can easily get footage of our best 10 banners revealed with the Olympic arena appearing in the background.

This is not done within the arena, this is outside the arena, so “arena authorities” can not stop this. This doesn’t even need to be done close to the arena entrance, so even “street authorities” can not stop this either.

This can be done far away from any “street authorities”, even 1 km away from the arena, we only need have the arena appearing in the background. The international media simply needs 80% banner space up front, 20% arena in the background.

Actually, this needn’t even be done on the street: there are plenty of friends’ ROOFTOPS within 1km of the arena, from which we can film our banners being held with the arena in the background. (Hmm, a rooftop location will create an even MORE beautiful view of the arena in the background.)

So our legal filming location will be fine and “authorities” can NOT stop this footage: whether filmed close to the arena entrance or not so close, on a street or on a rooftop.

The only thing needed, for the international media to broadcast these 10 shocking banners about Japan’s refusal to outlaw Racial Discrimination, is having the arena appearing in the background.

#3. 10 seconds of English banners reduces J notice-time
(the average J-cop doesn’t understand such E-sentences)
(and besides, the banners are put away within 10 seconds)

So, Ministry of Japan (receiving daily reports of these comments)
this 100% legal 10-second 10-banner 2-minute film WILL be seen Worldwide
so Japan’s legislators must preemptively outlaw Racial Discrimination before 2020. 🙂

It’s been brought to my attention that Jeff Kingston’s final Japan Times column was published today.
Jeff has consistently called out Abe for his lies, failings, right wing recidivism and corruption as well has rightly criticizing J-Inc when called for.
Such an approach has meant that his columns have for a long time not enabled comments due to the rabid right wing hate expressed therein.
I was most surprised to learn that Jeff’s departure coincides with Japan Times having unspecified ‘new owners’ and I sincerely hope that the new owners are not ‘clearing house’ in order to hide the dark side of Japan from non-Japanese speakers.

This is sooo ‘1990’s Japan’…
Better cancel the Tokyo Olympics, or put up signs warning those Japanese girls to stop dropping their draws the first time they see a foreigner!
OR accept that this is a Japanese problem, not an NJ problem.

The Sumitomo Group cartel member NipponDenkiKabushikiGaisha a.k.a. Nippon Electric Company a.k.a. NEC recently 100% sponsored another “Japan is Number One” report entitled “The Safe Cities Index 2017” just as they did in 2015.

The “index-ranking” itself is first created by NEC, in which of course NEC executives carefully select which data sources to include, and which factors to give the highest priority to. Then the NEC pays the Economist Intelligence Unit to “NEUTRALLY perform ANALYSIS of the (NEC-chosen, NEC-prioritized) data, and NEUTRALLY perform publication of a REPORT about the (NEC-created) index-ranking. Thus the end result is: a totally neutral analysis summary white-paper report written by The Economist’s Intelligence Unit.”

Note the Economist (which people wrongly assume is usually publishing news articles written by journalists) is in fact publishing Advertisement-Articles whenever a legally required disclaimer appears at the top: “Advertisement Feature.”

All of the Economist’s “articles” with such a disclaimer at the top (for those who actually notice the Economist’s well-hidden small-font explanation) are admittedly:

“Advertisement-Articles, clearly demarcated, for the sponsor to communicate their advertising message. Such Advertisement-Articles are clearly labelled as: Advertisement Feature, Advertisement, Sponsored Content, Sponsor’s Perspective, “Brought to you by ___”, “Sponsored by ___” or words to that effect. Sponsors are solely responsible for all content of all such Advertisement-Articles, and their views do not necessarily reflect those of The Economist.”

Great, thanks for making that so clear. People were wrongly assuming that the following pages were The Economist articles, but it turns out they are actually all NEC Advertisement-Articles:

Then of course there is also the news-industry-wide problem of “real articles” (articles WITHOUT the legal advertisement disclaimer at top) which ALSO are also the result of bribes to the news-company owners.

Summary: News-companies pretend to be neutral reporters, but are in fact paid by corporations and governments to disguise advertisements as “articles” and merely “report” whatever the press releases tell them to, thus are propaganda-publishers.

Takeaway: Critical thinkers must continuously vigilantly ask themselves, “What are the lies which this article, this paragraph, this sentence, this phrase, intends to persuade the average reader to believe, and conversely, what is the true reality which the author (committee-think-tank-PR-group-publisher) is being paid to hide?”

Yeah, this was just a small noticed case of one Japanese company paying for advertising articles.

We have indeed repeatedly seen the much bigger problem of Japanese companies buying sufficient control of foreign media companies outright, which I am grateful you have brought to our attention Jim. 🙂

And we have indeed repeatedly seen the even bigger problem of Japanese government officials caught bullying American history book publishers to hide Japan’s unrepentant aggression which killed millions, and even the Japanese government itself caught bribing foreign think-tanks affecting American public-policies, which I am grateful Debito has brought to our attention. 🙂

And then of course there are Japan’s unpaid useful-idiots who are continuing to help enable Japan’s violations of human rights, by maliciously misspending time and energy cyber-bullying honest commenters.

For example, here is Mr. “Turning-Japanese” “Look at me, I somehow managed to enter a few Japanese-Race-Only establishments, so Japanese-Race-Only signs should remain legal” “Japan does not need to obey the U.N. Treaty which demands Japan outlaws such signs” “Japan does not have an embedded racism problem” still taking great pride in maliciously attacking (while concurrently attempting identity-fraud against) long-term-Japan-resident honest commenter Steve Jackman:
Here the troll publicly claims, “Steve Jackman has an inside connection to Japan Times. I did a little spearfishing social-experiment today…” https://archive.is/2vSxr
And here the troll proudly boasts basically, “I trolled Steve Jackman by creating a fake Disqus account pretending to be SJ’s Washington Post Disqus account, this action which I committed is not against Disqus rules as long as you don’t use the exact same avatar as the person whom you are pretending to be, I hope a lot of fellow trolls in this subreddit use this information which I am sharing, use it as you wish – I have friends who are Disqus employees, so I used Disqus to continue pretending to be SJ and trolling Steve Jackman for a long time, but Disqus eventually had to ban me since a Japan Times staff member complained about my identity-theft trolling-actions. My friends who are Disqus employees secretly told me that my being banned was at ‘the prerogative and discretion of The Japan Times’, so unfortunately my Disqus friends were unable to reinstate my identity-theft trolling-account.” https://archive.is/gWTqq

The self-admitted troll’s reddit account history shows that one month ago he even publicly posted Debito’s physical address, the evidence of that posting is well-preserved for the United States and Japan courts if needed, since that is possibly an actionable offense depending on the intent.

2 months ago, we saw a unique strong stance about “allowing more foreign workers won’t help Japan” “even 3 Syrian crisises” posted by that self-admitted cyber-troller above “Bonesupren” on Reddit.com:http://archive.is/LACcY
(Ctrl+F: it would need the influx of migrants from appropriately 3 Syrian crisises every year)

11 months ago, we saw that same unique strong stance about “allowing more foreign workers won’t help Japan” “even 3 Syrian crisises” posted by “Letteradegree” on Reddit.com:http://archive.is/8TqsM
(Ctrl+F: if we take the Syrian refugee crisis, and made sure that we had THREE of those every year)

Also 11 months ago, we saw that same unique strong stance about “allowing more foreign workers won’t help Japan” “even 3 Syrian crisises” originally proudly posted by someone on EastAsiaForum.com:http://archive.is/trVCi
(Ctrl+F: if we take the Syrian refugee crisis, and made sure that we had THREE of those every year)

But of course, it would be too big of a leap in logic to think that those 3 posts were written by the same person, so it must be just a coincidence.

So yeah, there is the evidence of the proud cyber-troll bragging about trolling Steve Jackman while pretending to be SJ and sharing Disqus identity-fraud techniques and insider-info from his Disqus-employee friends and much worse: publicly posting Debito’s physical address within the past month (with published archived history possibly proving in a court-of-law malicious intent behind that sharing of information which can aid, abet, encourage, or simply make easier, more death threats to be sent to Debito’s physical address by post or even leading to the increased chance of a physical attack in the future).

Such actions, combined with the various other Japan propaganda actions mentioned above, are all individually small aggressive actions which when added up together show a large clear pattern of propaganda, pushed by Japan towards the world, and attacks made by Japan against any long-term-Japan-residents who courageously state that Japan needs to outlaw racial-discrimination, with Japan’s overall immoral goal seemingly being to attempt to prevent the worldwide community of humanity from realizing:

Japan DOES indeed have an embedded racism problem, Japan DOES indeed need to be strongly encouraged (by the 193-nation-strong worldwide community) to begin obeying the signed U.N. CERD Treaty, and thus Japan DOES indeed need to legislate a law against race-based-discrimination in Japan immediately.